BCA boys hitting their stride at right time

Burlington Christian Academy guard Jamison Jeffers thinks his team is on the cusp of reaching its full potential.

It’s a development that can be credited to a schedule in November and December that challenged and sometimes beat up the Royals.

“I see that we’re finally starting to get in our groove,” Jeffers said. “We just have to keep it up. This helped us though, we played a lot of tough teams at the beginning of the season, that helped us know we’re going to be one of the best teams, if not the best team in the conference. I’m glad we did that.”

Things weren’t always that simple.

BCA opened its season with a seven-point victory against Vandalia Christian before losing to Raleigh Word of God 81-38 and against High Point Christian 97-51.

Word of God has produced Washington Wizards guard John Wall and North Carolina State star C.J. Leslie, while High Point Christian won 30 games last season and is 16-3 this season.

Throw in another two losses— including an overtime loss in the first round of the Greenfield Christmas Tournament — before the end of December, and the Royals had one fewer loss than last season’s total (five).

But it was also a stretch that helped BCA reach this point in the season, when the Royals have won five straight games, including four in the Triad Athletic Conference.

“The non-conference schedule we played early on, we got beat up and we took some shots, some big shots,” coach Brian Dehart said.

But Dehart, along with Jeffers and fellow senior Andrew Carden, agreed that the team’s turning point came during the Christmas tournament.

“We came together, after that first loss. We really shouldn’t have lost anyway. Overtime game, high-scoring game,” Jeffers said of the 100-96 loss to Freedom Christian.

BCA is 10-4 overall and 5-0 in its league, with a clear view of what it would take to win conference.

And, as Carden said, the Royals might not be in that position if they had faced some weaker opponents early in the season.

“We probably wouldn’t have had the problems that we did with the other teams and so we wouldn’t have known what to work on,” Carden said. “We worked some kinks out early on.”

The Royals have worked enough kinks to win their last two conference games by a combined 74 points.

One of Dehart’s concerns going into the conference slate was that BCA might have shown a tendency to play down to opponents’ levels. Based on the last two games, that concern seems to have faded.

“Sometimes it’s a problem with we’re looking to play at the other team’s level because we played such good teams, and then that level is not as good and we kind of step back, we’re having trouble getting going,” Dehart said. “But (Tuesday night), we didn’t have trouble getting going.

“I think that these guys have kind of been through the fire a little bit.”